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The damnation of St Christopher

Writer, orator and highbrow barfly Christopher Hitchens transformed, in his final years, from searing socialist showman into untouchable, saintly sage. But, asks his former media cohort, was this beatification deserved... at all?

Christopher Hitchens, my colleague at Vanity Fair, was diagnosed with cancer in 2010. But even before his illness, and his death almost two years later, he was on his way to sainthood.

His beatification, so complete that he now seems to have worn a lifetime halo, probably started with a 10,000- word profile about him written by Ian Parker in 2006 in the New Yorker - "A portrait," according to Parker, "in the shadow of a gigantic self-portrait." Before that, Hitchens occupied a pretty conventional slot as a left-wing writer in a period when the left was in decline and the free-market ethos was on the rise. By 2003 and 2004, however, he had become one of the more prominent left-wing converts to the Iraq war (perhaps the only one). This conversion was the subject of the New Yorker profile, offering a compelling portrayal of Hitchens' theatricality and oddball joie de guerre. His notoriety continued with the publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great, which became his first bestseller. His stature further rose with a second bestseller, a memoir of his life, Hitch 22 - confirming that his life had memoir stature. And then his fatal illness: chronicled in print and in public forums, it may be among the most public on record. Fevered encomiums followed.

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This transformation from political irregular and zealous polemicist to towering moral figure was curious, if not amazing, to many people (perhaps all of us) whose careers had intersected with his. How did the character actor become a leading man? How did the fool become a sage? And what about the bad stuff? Not just his full-throttled embrace of the Bush war but, before that, his casual and convenient betrayal of his friend, Hillary Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, back in the Monica Lewinsky days. Or his take on Bill Clinton, as virulent as that of the most kooky right-wingers. Or his weirdly tolerant relationship with some of the era's most infamous Holocaust deniers. These are the kind of epochal contretemps that, in the chattering class, usually make for deep enmity rather than enduring love.

Then, too, this sui generis British figure, full of British class issues, British political hair-splitting, British literary conceits, and plummy accent to boot, became, in his transmutation, a super-American - a gunslinger journalist.

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He was, self-styled, a writer engaged with his time, a bookish man called to join the day's great and bloody battles of conscience. But really his issues were largely of another era: internecine squabbles on the left; a Cold War attention to the world's geo-sectarian divisions; God's existence... or not. He never much grappled with technology, or money, or media, or the developing world's rising middle class - influences that, surely, were remaking the world a lot faster and a lot more profoundly than his long- time preoccupations.

He saw himself as a Sixties guy, even making the case that he was a significant figure in the tumultuous period from 1966 to 1968: "I did my stuff in helping my American comrades discredit first President Johnson and then President Nixon." Although, in fact, he was still a teenager in 1968. ("If you remember the Sixties," in Robin Williams' famous formulation, "you weren't there.") His was a nostalgic show.

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Hitchens' transformation from political irregular and zealous polemicist to towering moral figure was curious to many people

Walking into a Hitchens "event" in recent years could seem like having been dropped back into the late-Sixties maelstrom: Hitchens, sometimes with his wife, Carol Blue, falling rock-star-like from a limo, feet bare and bottle in hand, with these events often breaking down into obscenities and name calling.

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His frequent public forums - in which Hitchens' British-style debating skills were presented as a sort of miracle as well as a freak of nature, as if he were a more biting Rumpole - had become a significant and profitable part of his career. He had a cast of agents and hucksters who would organise and promote these events in cheap venues, reserving him a cut of the door.

In American media culture, he took a place last occupied by the conservative pundit William F Buckley, Jr who regularly wowed middle America with his hauteur and erudition on his talk show,

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Firing Line. Of note, Hitchens seemed almost invariably to be matched in his debates with lesser lights - it was Hitchens among the stupids.

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I was always on reasonable terms with Hitchens - or certainly had the younger man's good grace to mostly shut up while he talked - and once, at the height of the Iraq war, he asked me to moderate one of these encounters.

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The other protagonist was probably demented (if not homeless) and borderline coherent. Still, it was a packed house. Hitchens arrived drunk - though I wondered if it was more pretend than actually drunk because he kept talking about how much he'd consumed - but at some point he certainly was drunk. While many people made the excuse for him about how well he could hold his liquor (another old-fashioned trope), he was, in this instance, as walleyed and uncomprehending as any other person I've known who was drinking at his level.

Hitchens was a great social figure. In a way, he was accessible to all. But I always found him perplexingly impersonal.

I'd say he had only partial awareness of the event itself. The famous ad-libber seemed to stay focused because his lines were carefully memorised. The other debater kept interrupting with obscenities and catcalls and, trying to be a diligent moderator, I kept stopping the debate and returning to where the interruptions began. A swaying Hitchens would back up to the cue and repeat his lines verbatim.

Eventually it became impossible to continue - although Hitchens himself seemed immune to the insults and commotion. But I finally said, in some despair, "Christopher, let's just go." When he hesitated, I said, "Well, I'm off," shaming him, it seemed, into following me. But then he shortly doubled back, delivering himself, in some obviously blissful sense, into the passion of the crowd.

When last seen, he was, in rave fashion, at the centre of a group of young men worshipfully levitating him, while others cat-called and gestured obscenely from the sidelines.

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In contrast to his Hunter S Thompson persona as a connoisseur of chaos and self-destructive excess, he also styled himself as a public intellectual. He was, or fancied himself to be, disciplined, precise, scholarly, even pedantic when it came to spelling out both arcane facts and moral imperatives. He was not, though, an academic or scholar in any actual or formal sense. He was more accurately an autodidact - with the autodidact's self-justifications and disproportion.

Along with his many books, there was a near-daily production of columns and book reviews. Much of the work was repetitive and boilerplate, the same subjects recast for different outlets. The myriad essays tend to the pontifical, full of moral dudgeon and high virtue and not a lot of surprises. Nevertheless, such output had the effect of making the game look easy. It was writing that probably appealed more to would-be writers than to readers.

In all this manic industry, there is really no memorable Hitchens book - certainly none that breaks literary ground, or forges a new argument.

He wrote short admiring books about George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as well as pamphlet-like books attacking Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, but no true biography. Most of his books are cobbled-together collections, or pieces of columns. There is no narrative long enough to have truly displayed his gifts, or justified his reputation, as storyteller or polemicist. He proudly told people his God book was written in four months.

Hitchens, an avid practitioner of the literary quote as flourish and end of discussion, might have added here the AJ Liebling injunction: "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anyone who can write better."

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In a sense, Hitchens' most self-defining book, or his key personal positioning statement (though all his books are strong on personal positioning) is neither his God book nor his memoir, but his short Letters To A Young Contrarian.

The conceit of the book is that he is the teacher and that an admiring and precocious student has asked for his advice - a setup that only the young and admiring might find credible ("You rather tend to flatter and embarrass me, when you inquire my advice as to how a radical or 'contrarian' life may be lived"). The book is modelled on Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet, but, hopelessly cloying, feels more like Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.

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The book's message is... well, nothing more than that young people should challenge the conventional wisdom and question authority. It is also defensive and self-aggrandising as it lays out the theoretical rationale for being Christopher Hitchens. (A Hitchens aside which might have been directed at Hitchens himself: "If you have ever argued with a religious devotee... you will have noticed that his self-esteem and pride are involved in the dispute and that you are asking him to give up something more than a point in argument.")

And in a sense it ends up making the case against him. Hitchens was really not a contrarian - at least not a contrarian in the sense of someone with eccentric, lonely opinions, often held for no other reason than that no one else holds them - but rather doctrinal and partisan. What's more, he mostly gave offence where no offence would really be taken - or where he could be guaranteed a phalanx of defenders. Mother Teresa was one of his theoretically courageous targets - except who cares about Mother Teresa?

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His God book followed Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Atheism was already a bestselling view. The God book is also a particular sleight of hand. It makes a persuasive case against a deserving target, so you might forget that virtually the entirety of the Hitchens-reading audience is comprised of nonbelievers - nonbelievers who have not even had to have a crisis of faith.

The God question may have been a lively and risky one in the Sixties, but now belief in God is more a demographic condition than a philosophical argument. (Hitchens seemed to enjoy debating the red-state faithful - again, Hitchens among the stupids.) Still, it was, in its embrace of conventional wisdom, a major commercial success - and, in that sense, a further self-justification. His crowning work is his memoir which, released days before his illness was diagnosed, takes on a special poignancy. But it's a particularly odd book for Americans. It is written in the straight-forward style of the British memoir. That is, it begins with birth and traces the author's life to some conclusion. This type of autobiography - except in the case of a president or his wife or a few other exceptional and beloved celebrities - is virtually unpublishable in America. The form of the American memoir is thematic and dramatic - there must be a point and a story. It is not enough to merely have had even an exciting life. We require focus and structure in our memoirs, rather than just a chronology and an unloading. American memoirs are, too, confessional, whereas the British approach is full of avoidance and self-congratulations - a consistent note for Hitchens.

Now, Hitchens does have a story and confession. His mother commits suicide in the first chapter - but this is dispensed with forthwith as mere background to Hitchens' own greater experiences.

And he confesses his teenage homosexuality - but really it's not so much a confession, but a dismissal: everybody did it, pay no attention. (His friend Gully Wells, often thought to be the model for the protagonist in his friend Martin Amis' first book, The Rachel Papers - and, as Hitchens reminds us, the step-daughter of the famous philosopher AJ Ayer - is fond of pointing out that Hitchens was "gay much longer than all the other boys who were gay". But that is not a conflict in the book.) The book, much of it about the quarrels on the left, circumvents the personal - or emotional.

And while it is an autobiography, great parts of his life are weirdly excised from it, including an eight-year first marriage that produced two children.

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It is like a presidential memoir. It is a true believers' book. And what you have to believe in is Christopher Hitchens. As death approached there were ever-more believers.

The book is also about social climbing. In an obvious sense, Hitchens' entire life is about social climbing.

He turns the when, the how, the what-if of the almost-missed chance, the luck of not saying the nasty thing he might have been expected to say, of his first meeting with Martin Amis into a Proustian moment. (Hitchens denies in his memoir that he had a sexual obsession with Amis, but it sure sounds like he does, and Gully Wells reports that he was hopelessly smitten and for years mooned around about Amis.)

The background to everything he writes is about who he knows and who he met when - and how fortuitous each of these meetings turned out to be. The entire Hitchens oeuvre is an orgasm of name-dropping: "My late friend Ron Ridenhour, who became briefly famous... my dear friend Salman Rushdie... my dear friend Ian McEwan... [I first met] Thabo Mbeki, now the president of South Africa... I first met Kim Dae-jung, now the president of South Korea and a Nobel Laureate for Peace... my Chilean friend Ariel Dorfman... my friend Peter Schneider, the great novelistic chronicler of Berlin life... my friend Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident... my friend Martin Amis... my friend Salman Rushie [again]... my old friend Edward Said... I was to become very close to Jessica Mitford... my Argentine anti-fascist friend Jacobo Timerman... my later friend Jessica Mitford [again]... our dear friend Anthony Holden... my friendship with Brian and Keith McNally... my friend Martin Amis

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The obvious point - the instructive point - is that this is how Hitchens, the son of a career naval officer, navigated his upward trajectory through the class system. He made himself the consummate insider. I can't think of a more clubby writer than Christopher Hitchens.

There was no masking - nor attempt, on his part, to hide or minimise - the particular Britishness of his class and its aspirations. He was off to boarding school at age eight. He was bisexual until he wasn't (that particular form of upper-class British sexuality). He was obsessed with spanking. He was hermetically Oxbridge. Of course, he was a lefty in angry (and fond) opposition to all this. His intimates were also other lefties all drawn from a Brideshead set. Save for Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal, practically all his literary models were sniffily British. His style of journalism, that particular, opportunistic, cynical British form (ridiculed by the British too), was all about parachuting into a foreign country and acquiring, mirabile dictu, instant expertise.

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He was an exaggerated figure of Britishness. It rather became a chief aspect of his appeal. He was a British-themed writer. It was the Downton Abbey effect. (Curiously, there are really few Brits like this any more.) He suggested, too, that real writers were British. Indeed, while he professed a constant formal love for America, he couldn't help his condescension and contempt - which was probably appealing, too.

Notably, many of those in Hitchens' set moved to America - Britain being too small for them and their ambitions. Anna Wintour, who Hitchens almost married, became the editor of Vogue. Gully Wells and her husband at the BBC got a house in the West Village and Hitchens lived in their basement. Later, he moved into the basement at Andrew Cockburn and his wife Leslie's place (Cockburn ultimately fell out with Hitchens). Salman Rushdie moved to America too. And finally, Amis followed.

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This pack of media Brits formed a movable power clique, always promoting each other. (There is a point here, too, about America as a fading literary superpower and their opportunities in this vacuum.)

Of note, somehow Hitchens, for a long time the runt of this Brit-lit pack, the courtier and designated promoter, emerged as its most famous member.

He was a bully. This may have been because he was so often drunk.

But it is also because to him - both as a matter of character and, no doubt, owing to his long years on the left - this was a binary world, good and bad, right and wrong. In that, he had the appeal more of a Fox News personality than of an essayist dwelling in the grey areas.

Still, he was theatrical or clownish enough to be forgiven for his often near-violent opinions - "Oh that's just Hitch." Except he wasn't just theatrical. He wielded something close to an actual stick. He could be dangerous.

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There was his malevolent animosity towards Bill Clinton, a companion piece to his blithe satisfaction, at age 14 (repeated with renewed satisfaction in his memoir), over JFK's assassination.

His issue, and his-near violent reaction, was about the relativism of American liberalism - its crafty compromises, its moral triangulation, its Clintonianism. The purity (and verbal violence) of the American right was much more to his temperament. Clinton, the master relativist, caused Hitchens to froth wildly - and to madly insist he was a rapist who should be in jail.

Part of this was Sixties stuff. It may be that Hitchens, nearly three years younger than Clinton, resented the Oxford upper-class man's greater Sixties status (Hitchens seemed to have a minor obsession with whether or not he was ever in the same room as Clinton at Oxford - naturally, he concluded he was). Indeed, Hitchens accused Clinton of informing on American anti-war students during his time in Britain.

Conspiracy lurks behind almost all of Hitchens' causes and passions.

This was the apparent background to Hitchens' decision to testify against his friend Sidney Blumenthal, who told a grand jury that he had not besmirched Monica Lewinsky to the media. Hitchens said, no, that wasn't true - Blumenthal told him that Lewinsky was a slut. And suddenly hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, as well as possibly his freedom, hung in the balance for Blumenthal because of a gossipy lunch.

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Hitchens' rationale was straightforward: he had to do it to help get Clinton.

Then Iraq: Hitchens took up his defence of the war when it still looked like it would be a certain American romp. He was very vocal about his view of the war's righteousness for another year or so, becoming a sort of mascot of the neoconservatives, and then gradually quieted down as everything went wrong.

Then the Holocaust: for reasons no doubt involving the left, Israel, the British ambivalence toward Jews, and his own later-in-life discovery that his mother was Jewish, people who walked the thin line of Holocaust revision and outright doubt held great fascination for him. But if you tried to call him on this (indeed, he was probably not a Holocaust denier as much as a Holocaust-denier enabler), he threatened suit. On top of everything else, the thin-skinned Hitchens was litigious - he'd cost you money if you crossed him.

Again, all this might have more logically left him as a controversial and divisive figure. In a sense, though, if not by plan, then by remarkable instinct, he was saved by God. There being no God was perhaps the one issue everybody in the greater Hitchens universe could easily agree on - and Hitchens suddenly became its worthy and charming advocate.

He was forgiven his right-wing doctrinal alliance because he was now challenging the right's belief in God. At the same time, he mitigated this affront to his new friends on the right by liking the Islam God even less than the Christian one.

Hitchens was a great social figure. In a way, he was accessible to all. But I always found him perplexingly impersonal. There was the wall of all that verbiage. Off the page and in person... blah blah blah... and always repeating his own columns.

I never had any sense of whether he was happy or despairing.

Lonely or content. Satisfied or self loathing. But certainly being drunk so much of the time would not suggest he was tiptop.

It was an external life. His greatest effort always seemed to be to live in public, with the effort itself being more important than the nature of the opinions or controversy that got him there. This made him something of an object of curiosity and admiration in a time when more and more (if not most) writers were losing their platforms and retreating to the edges.

I think it is probably not a coincidence that as the existential crisis of journalism became more severe, Hitchens became an increasingly salutary and reassuring figure. In spite of it all, he continued and thrived. This is another version, of course, of being famous for being famous.

He became a model for the large numbers of young people who wanted into the game (confusingly, as the business shrank, more people sought to be in it). Not only did his example suggest that there could still be a livelihood living by one's pen, he showed that there could still be great romance to it - and damn the internet.

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He spoke his mind and lived his life with profit and impunity - or so it seemed.

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